


Halves

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-02
Updated: 2012-04-02
Packaged: 2017-11-02 22:58:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/374296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Elrics have never gone separate ways before.</p>
<p>[Major spoilers for Brotherhood.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Halves

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt "torture" ~~and as a defense of Elricest~~.

Al has been sidestepping the sharp pangs of more-than-nostalgia—of absence, of loss, of that space that’s shaped so clearly he can’t bring himself to look. Unsurprisingly, he and his pair of companionable chimeras had to delay their eastward sojourn before they’d even left Amestris in order to take down a smuggling ring that relied on some volatile alchemy. Al is dressing to go out and buy their tickets for the next leg of the trip when there’s a knock at the door.

He adjusts the cuffs of his shirt as he answers, because the gesture brings his palms close.

“There’s a telephone call for you, Mr. Elric,” the receptionist says.

Briefly, Al wonders if his wonderful, beautiful new body is rejecting him like the last one, because his stomach twists inside-out, and his heart clogs his throat, and that’s not how organs are meant to work.

The receptionist backs out of the way at no more prompting than his expression, and he feels like he’s floating down the stairs rather than running as if it’s for his life. Not many people know that he’s here.

He swallows, swallows again, lifts the receiver. “Hello?” It could be anyone, could be—

“Al,” Winry says.

When a voice was the only thing he had, the only way he could reach out, touch people, change them, move them—Al became very familiar with the nuances of speech. And from inside the steel cage, he learned how to listen: how to listen to everything, to words, to tones, to animals, to the wind, to the nights and the mornings, to the silence.

Winry’s voice has always been easy. She can’t lie worth a damn, and she’s never had a reason to hide her feelings. In his name—in the solitary syllable—Al heard everything he needs to know.

“Where is he?” he asks.

“I—don’t know. He sent—it was a telegram. It said he’ll arrive in Resembool the day after tomorrow.”

“I’ll be on the next train,” Al says.

Kindly, Jerso and Zampano say that they have families, so they understand.

But they don’t. No one does; Al doesn’t _understand_. He just knows, feels, acts, reacts. He just bleeds out of these gouges to his soul and races towards the only home he’ll ever know.

No one meets him at the station. Realistically, a matter of minutes won’t make a difference, but he runs, and then he misses it—misses the body that couldn’t tire, didn’t sweat, was immune to nausea and to deep, visceral pain.

It says a lot about them that the Rockbells have never been in the habit of locking their front door. Den barks a greeting from the yard, but Al’s two steps into the house before Pinako has set her hand on the doorknob.

He can’t breathe. “Wh—?”

She points up stairs with the hand holding her pipe. Al finds a little more strength, and a little more fear.

Winry is sitting in a rocking chair that the three of them used to pile onto, all giggles and writhing limbs, throwing their weight to make it tilt creakily back and forth. They’d pretend it was a pirate galley when they were feeling roguish, or a navy ship when they weren’t. The young man in the bed, face turned to the window, hands folded on top of the sheet, was always the captain either way.

Winry looks up, and then she’s out of the chair and starting towards him—at which point Al realizes that he’s frozen in the doorway with one of his shoes across the threshold.

“No,” he hears himself say as Winry moves to intercept him. “Let me—”

Brother didn’t look.

Brother didn’t look at him.

Winry manhandles Al out into the hall, a task made both easier and more difficult by the fact that every part of him has ossified. It’s a familiar sensation—the feeling that his soul has begun to unravel.

“He’s not deaf,” Winry says before he can even think, let alone speculate. “He’s not—I mean, his head’s all in order, as far as we can tell. We can’t get much out of him, but he’s… rational. He’s just—closed. I don’t… I don’t know.” She drops her face into her hands, and Al recovers enough to wrap both arms around her and pat her shoulders while they shake.

“I’ll fix it,” he says. “I’ll bring him back—like he did for me. It’ll be all right.”

He’s never sounded more hollow.

 

 

His throat tightens as he takes Winry’s place in the chair. He runs one fingertip along the edge of the seat, adding _worn wood, lovingly scarred and sun-warmed_ to his mental index of things he can touch. He always used to assume—presume—that his brother would stay at the top of that list, but now he’s terrifyingly unsure.

“Well,” he says helplessly. “Th-that was a short trip, wasn’t it?”

Edward says nothing.

The silence tingles and then stings.

“I missed you,” Al offers, even though the word can’t begin to describe the agonies he now has the pulse and the gut and the lungs to know.

Ed doesn’t move.

Al swallows, stands, and sits down on the edge of the bed. Ed’s still staring out the window, but Al hasn’t thought for a moment that he’s actually watching Den chase the squirrels around the tree.

“What happened?” Al asks quietly.

“Useful tip,” Ed says. “Creta errs on the side of caution, especially when it comes to potential spies.”

Al knew. He knew when he saw the way Brother wasn’t leaning his back against the headboard. He knew from the long sleeves and the loose hair. Perhaps that’s why every muscle went numb in the doorway, as if in some desperate hope; as if refusing to get closer, refusing to confirm, would allow him to pretend, to undo, to un-realize, to un-hurt.

His voice sticks, and his words taste sour. “You have to be more careful, Brother.”

Ed turns on him, eyes aflame— _burning_ , and haunted, and so, so tired.

“ _Careful_?” Ed says. “Yeah, okay, sorry, Al. Next time I’ll just be more _careful_ , and it won’t matter that I’m a piece of nonmagical _pulp_ , and there’s nothing I can do out there _except_ get my ass kicked in interrogation rooms for a week because I didn’t have a fucking Cretan library card.”

Al doesn’t want this heart anymore. It bruises at a touch, and this…

“Let me go w-with—”

“You’ve got your own life now,” Ed says, and he turns the fury out past the windowpane again. “You don’t—I’m not going to be some parasite. I made my choice. We both did. These are the consequences. Equiva—Equivalent—”

Al watches one drop darken on his brother’s shirt, then two.

“Show me,” he whispers.

Ed’s head angles down so that his bangs fall over his eyes. Al realizes that he’s holding his breath and remembers that he shouldn’t.

After a moment of not-silence—of the breeze gently rattling the rain-warped windowframe, of Den barking, of the soft scrape of metal downstairs—Ed draws an unsteady breath and shifts. Then he peels off the shirt, and Al follows the line of his brother’s revealed skin upward, waiting for the latticework of welts and half-healed gashes to stop.

But it doesn’t stop. They deepen, and they intertwine, and they savage his brother’s shoulder-blades.

“No,” Al says, so long too late. “No, no, no. This—this shouldn’t have—I should have been there—”

“It’s not your responsibility to look after me,” Ed says.

Al curls his hands into fists so tight they ache. “Yes, it is! It always has been! You fought when I couldn’t; when you were tired, I carried you; when I fell apart, you literally put me back together. We put our _lives_ on the line for each other. We always have. We’re not—we’re not just brothers, Ed. We both put our hearts and our minds and our blood into trying to bring Mom back, and we went places I never could have imagined to set each other right—even before that. We studied under Teacher as a unit. We’re not Edward and Alphonse; we’re the _Elrics_. I’m just a half without you, Brother. We did it all _together_. We only _could_ do those things, do any of those things, because it was the two of us. Because we looked after each other.”

“Past tense,” Ed says quietly. “It’s not your fault, Al. It was time to split up and be our own people. I’m just the kind of person who gets his ass kicked, apparently.” He shrugs, both shoulders even now, and the web of wounds shivers as his muscles move. “You don’t have to try to justify the facts, Alphonse. It’s fine. We both saw it, so we both did what had to be done. We just don’t… need each other anymore.”

Al isn’t—he _isn’t_ —the blanket crinkles; his knuckles blanch— _he isn’t going to_ —

“Hey,” Ed says, gentle in surprise. “Hey, come on. That’s—I mean, that’s okay. It means we’ve grown up.”

“I don’t _want_ to grow up!” Al screams, twisting the sheet between his hands. “We already did! We stopped being children the minute Mom died, and then we just kept growing up, over and over again, looking the worst parts of the world in the face! It wasn’t just Mom, Ed; it was the rehabilitation after your automail, and the military, and then Nina, and General Hughes, and Laboratory Five, and Briggs, and the Homunculi, and _Dad_! The only reason we got through all of that is because each of us was the only thing the other had, but that was _enough_! We gave up everything else! No one is _ever_ going to tell me, after what I’ve seen, that to be an adult, I have to sacrifice _you_ , too!”

Ed rubs the heel of his left hand at his eye. “It’s not like that.”

Al gets a fistful of his brother’s hair and pulls. “Yes, it is!”

Ed tries to bat his hand away. “Quit it, Al. It’s fine.”

“I’m not letting go of you,” Al says. “Not ever. Not ever again.”

Ed tries to pry his fingers loose. “Come on, Al. We’re—we’re supposed to have lives. Have futures.”

Al tightens his grip and tugs harder. “Why can’t we just have one between the two of us?” Ed grabs his wrist, but he holds on. “ _Why not_?”

Ed’s hand clenches. Then it drops to the blanket, and Ed draws it into his lap, looking at the path of wrinkles in the wool.

“Because you’re supposed to go out and meet people,” Ed says. “Learn things. See stuff. Fall in love.”

“I told you,” Al says. “You’re the only person I’ve ever needed. And you’re damn well the only one I’ve ever wanted, too.”

Ed lowers his head and runs a hand over his face. “You don’t know what I—”

“No one knows you better than I do,” Al says.

“That’s not true,” Ed whispers.

Al drags him into a hug—carefully, carefully, mindful of the wounds, needing the warmth. “I love you, Brother.”

Ed’s hands curl in the back of Al’s shirt. “And _that’s_ not fair,” he says.

“Never again,” Al mumbles into his neck. “Feeling like a shell made sense when I was made of steel. Feeling like one now just—Brother, don’t… leave. Don’t ever leave again.”

The bridge of Ed’s nose presses into his shoulder. “You were always the master at getting me to do stupid shit, Al.” He’s quiet for a moment. “I wanted you to have a chance. At—alternatives. We _had_ to be like that, back then. We didn’t have a choice. And I’d never—I’d never look at anyone but you. I wanted you to be free to find something else if you wanted.”

“I want you,” Al says. “And I always will.” His fingers graze a rough scab, and he shifts around Ed’s side and starts at the bottom, softly kissing injuries all the way up. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs to them. “I’m sorry, Brother. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Ed’s shoulders tense. “Al—”

“Hush,” Al says. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I—”

Ed twists around to catch his mouth, and Al thinks he understands what people mean about true love. They don’t mean _true_ as the opposite of _false_ ; they mean it as _complete_. Love as wholeness. Real, genuine, in the blood and the bone marrow.

Al likes kissing, and he loves his brother’s skin. He traces the marks left by the automail port, a dark parenthesis ingrained by Ed’s collarbone. “It always made me sad,” he says. “You’ve got so many scars.”

“They’re lessons,” Ed says, sliding a thumb along Al’s jaw. “And I wouldn’t trade ’em back.”

Al wraps his arms around Ed’s neck and settles close. “They’re part of you,” he says. “And that kind of makes them beautiful.”

He can feel Ed smiling against his cheek. “Don’t get cheesy on me, now.”

Al draws back just enough to stick out his tongue, and Ed laughs.

And they’re whole.


End file.
